Market conditions have driven companies to leverage employees, partners, suppliers, customers and information to reduce costs. To successfully accomplish this, organizations must efficiently control the way people, resources, and information technology interact. This can be referred to as Business Process Management (BPM).
Business processes are used to control costs, speed production, increase resource efficiency and control information that is shared among internal and external participants, and across applications. Thousands of business processes permeate such areas as engineering, manufacturing, distribution, sales, branding, marketing, advertising, purchasing, corporate communications, legal, customer relations, finance, staffing, payroll, benefits, training, employee records and more.
A business process is an ordered series of events. An event is the managed change of information from one or more sources to one or more destinations. Sources and destinations can be internal, customer, or partner applications, documents, vendor catalogs, etc. Controlling the change is generally accomplished by managing how the event is accessed, who collaborates to perform the change and how it is approved. Typically, an event manages on a single item or a group of similar items. For example, the purchase of a pen is an event. Access is often restricted to certain users. When launched, the price and description of the pen is pulled from the vendor catalog, and the billing cost center and user information is pulled from internal company applications. The user makes changes and a manager may be required to approve the purchase. Once approved, a purchase order is sent to the vendor and to accounts payable.
A business process can be a comprised of a single event as in the purchase of a pen, or it can be a complex succession hundreds of events launched both sequentially and simultaneously at varying points in business process. Some events simply perform their function and stop, while other events perform their function and launch another set of events. Events that must be completed in order to launch another event are referred to as prerequisite events and events that are dependent on the completion of prerequisite events are called dependent events.
Reuse of Events:
Referring to FIG. 1, current systems launch events in a series such that one or more prerequisite events are launched and upon completion, one or more dependent events are launched. For example, the business process to create a new employee record (commonly called on-boarding) is dependent on positive completion of security background check and drug testing events. Current systems require that the security background check and the drug testing event be launched together and when they are both completed the On-Boarding event is launched.
The same event is often required in more than one business processes. For example, an event of purchasing a pen may be required when hiring a new employee and therefore is one of the events in an on-boarding business process. Current employees may also need to purchase pens during the normal course of day-to-day business, so it is also used as its own business process.
Depending on the use of the event, different access and approval rules may be applied. For example, the event of purchasing a pen when used in an on-boarding business process would likely be launched by the completion of the security background test and drug testing events and therefore would not need to have access controlled. It would also not need to have any approval because it is part of an approved business process. However, when used as a business process by employees who are already on-board, access to purchase a pen could be restricted to area administrators and a first level manager may be required to approve the purchase. In current systems, these access and approval rules are a defined in the event. If the same event were used in both processes and the event rules required access control and approval, the day-to-day purchase of a pen would work fine, but the on-boarding process would require a unnecessary approval and may require that the administrative assistant launch it manually. If the same event were used in both processes and the event rules required no access control and no approval, the on-boarding process would work fine, but any employee could order pens and nobody would be required to approve it.
Problem:
Each use of an event requires the creation of a new event; events cannot be reused. This increases the time and cost of creating new business processes. Because there are multiple instances of the same event, changes that affect similar events need to be made to each event one at a time. For example, if the company changes the pen supplier from one vendor to another, the vendor must be changed in each event that purchases a pen. Some events could be duplicated dozens of times to satisfy all the possible processes, requiring dozens of changes. If it were possible to reuse the same event for all processes, then it would only require one change.
Exception Management:
In the day-to-day course of doing business, it is often necessary to override one or more prerequisite events to allow the dependent event to launch. This is exception management. Because current systems launch events sequentially, each prerequisite event must be monitored to ensure the business process can continue. For example, the recruiter must monitor the security background check and the drug test events to ensure they are completed in time to launch the on-boarding event so the new employee can start work the planned start date.
If it is determined that a prerequisite event will not be completed before the dependent event needs to launch, an exception is necessary to continue the business process. Exceptions generally require approval, so the user who monitors the business process must identify the need and notify the approver of the problem. Upon approval, the user or an administrator overrides the event. For example, a newly hired candidate needs to start quickly to fill a critical business need. The recruiter monitors the hiring process and determines that the security background check will be not completed before the start date. He gathers information and notifies the VP that he needs an override. The VP reviews and approves. The recruiter contacts the administrator who manually overrides the security background check. The system then launches the on-boarding process to create an employee record and start the candidate.
Problem:
Managing an exception can take as little as a few hours, but will often take several days during which time the business process can stall. A stalled process can translate to stalled revenue, lost business, dissatisfied customers, missing assets, or many more problems. For example, starting a new employee critical to a project that directly impacts revenue can be delayed by a week or more. A technical support process can impact customer uptime putting the customer at risk. A delayed sales process can lose the deal. A delayed engineering change order can take a factory down. In addition, time is consumed monitoring the events and managing exceptions. Labor consumed in a large company with thousands of business processes can translate to millions of dollars per year in unnecessary costs.
Monitoring:
Each event in a business process requires constant monitoring and regular exception management. For example, a recruiter in a large manufacturing or sales organization may hire 100 employees per week. The on-boarding process of each candidate must be monitored daily to ensure that new employees start timely. An on-boarding process may have 15 to 20 events, so the recruiter may need to monitor between 1500 and 2000 events per day.
Problem:
The volume and complexity of business processes is very high and frequently exceptions are missed causing the process to stall. In companies that have automated many business processes, a significant amount of time is used monitoring ongoing processes.
Conclusion:
A business process management platform that automatically monitors events and process exceptions, and is capable of reusable events is therefore necessary to decrease cost, improve efficiency and reduce complexity so management can improve control.